Tukking Hell
Two Hips, Two Tuk-Tuks, One Magnificent Moustache
It begins in a hospital ward in Harare, Zimbabwe. Steve Callahan — a shaved-head, silver-chained Englishman, fifty-three, who spent twenty-two years running logistics operations and recently resigned without reading a single one of his 417 unread emails — is staring at the ceiling of Room 8 at Milton Park Hospital, freshly post hip replacement surgery, slowly losing his mind from enforced stillness.
In the next bed is Christopher Ndlovu Mackenzie. Sixty-one. Six-foot-two. Zimbabwean-Scottish engineer of magnificent bearing and even more magnificent grey moustache. Also hip surgery. Also staring at the ceiling. Also, quietly, weeping — over a book called Three Adult Lives by Stephen Castree, which argues that most of us live not one adult life but three, and that middle-age stagnation is not the end but a crossroads with a completely open road ahead.
Steve reads the book. By morning, something has cracked open in both of them — not their new hips, but something older and more important. The question neither can un-hear: is what comes next entirely up to me?
The answer, drawn on a hospital napkin, is two tuk-tuks — Thai-style three-wheeled auto-rickshaws — shipped to Cartagena, Colombia, and driven eight thousand kilometres south through the Americas to Panama City.
What follows is gloriously, improbably alive. In Cartagena, they meet Valentina — silver-haired, riding-booted, utterly formidable — who has driven the same roads solo on a motorcycle and gives them the most useful advice of their lives. In Colombia's mountains, a twenty-six-year-old mechanic named Miguel fixes a broken engine with a modified hairpin and refuses payment. In Ecuador's market, Steve nearly collides with Marisol — a Spanish painter with paint-stained cuffs and the kind of smile that rearranges a room. In Bolivia's La Paz, Chris falls unexpectedly and completely for Elena, a multilingual translator of quick hands and strong opinions.
The road breaks them down, lifts them up, and strips away everything they'd spent decades accumulating that wasn't actually them. At Bolivia's breathtaking Salar de Uyuni — 10,000 square kilometres of silence — Steve sits alone on the salt and feels his armour become unnecessary.
By Panama, they've built not just a journey but a life: a tuk-tuk adventure company, a Caribbean hotel called The Hummingbird, and — against all operational logic — happiness.
Tukking Hell is for anyone who has ever thought "not yet" and is starting to suspect they've run out of time to keep saying it.
